In rare cases, employees even post fliers and send e-mail messages soliciting like-minded colleagues to support candidates at rallies and other face-to-face get-togethers.
On social networks, we solicit "likes," "shares" and "follows," which are forms of approval and validation by others.
Direct fan-to-Page messages opens a new customer service channel, but Pages can no longer use a default landing tab to solicit Likes and app engagement.
But they are also declarations, more than skin deep, soliciting the like-minded for an alliance.
Tom Lillig, who lives in Chicago, wrote to me in December; he'd recently made Sports Illustrated's "Signs of the Apocalypse" for soliciting Facebook "likes" to convince his wife that they should name their soon-to-be-born daughter "Manti," after Notre Dame's star linebacker, Manti Te'o.
The Knicks are soliciting groups like college alumni organizations and using e-mail messages for a ticket exchange program to reduce no-shows.
Organizations like the Media Fund, America Coming Together and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund have spent months soliciting donors like George Soros, the financier and philanthropist, and Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corporation, the insurance company.
Mr. Hills set about making the fiction serious again, soliciting stories like "Nude Croquet" by Leslie Fiedler, a famously poisonous depiction of New York intellectuals, and Arthur Miller's decline-of-the-old-West parable, "The Misfits".
(Except Senator Robert Torricelli, Ms. Murray's predecessor, who likes soliciting cash from corporate donors better than breathing).
But in an era when many night spots are soliciting social media "likes," Giorgio's asks members to refrain from posting, and for the most part, there were no glowing smartphones in sight on a February evening.
No party leader much likes soliciting money, but he seems to find it painful beyond words: a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that whereas many of his New Labour predecessors were Cavaliers, often ecstatic to be feted by the rich, Miliband is a self-evident Roundhead, devoid of the taste for opulence and easy living that made the likes of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson such capable fundraisers.
